From Personal to Social Finance

Transcript

oh where's the clicker hi so today we're going to be talking about from personnel to social finance before we get into the talk i'll just do a quick intro my name is rachel i'm a founder of project called good ghosting which is a saving defy saving application i'm also going to be co-presenting with my colleague hill who's also a founder of

good ghosting and our kind of in-house defy dejan so we're going to be talking about some trends we're seeing that kind of moving finance away from being something quite siloed and quite personal to a more exciting and social finance so first of all if you think about traditional finance it is really pretty much a solitary affair like you have your personal savings account a pension an etf and maybe you have a joint account with your spouse or some accommodation for your immediate family but it is essentially just for you and really this is just because i mean this is how banks work you sign up as an individual entity you do your kyc blah blah blah blah and then you go along like this and

it's all a bit lonely and a little bit boring i think to be honest um so we can look at some more fun things today um but having said that of course in the kind of non-defy world there's been quite a number of examples of kind of social finance and when i was um researching this a couple of things jumped out to me about these examples of social finance one they're often for people who are you know otherwise cut out of mainstream traditional finance and two they often hold like a very important social function as well as just being purely financial vehicles so the first one is something called rotational savings and credit associations really popular throughout the world

they're called like tanders in latin america i found like there was over 200 different names that i could find for them when i did a bit of research so uh yeah huge globally they pretty much operate like this diagram shows it's a it's a great up of people everyone puts in some money every month for example and then one person receives all of that money and it rotates round until everyone has received um a payout it's got a number of benefits particularly if you don't have any access to loans this would be a really great way to kind of get access to that uh lowers the risk of inflation and it has quite an important social functionality um i was reading about people who'd emigrated out of mexico and found like

tanda's in la were like a really important touch point for them to kind of connect with community when they're outside of their home country um local currencies this is the brixton pound i'm from from london so i remember this coming out it's quite a fun experimentation to kind of increase um spend in local areas and circulate more quickly than no traditional finance etc investment clubs of course since the beginning of time people have kind of invested in groups but this has really happened formerly from around like the 1900s onwards and in 1995 there was around 35 000 investment clubs globally i imagine it's a lot more than that now

um and this uh photo of um some delightful uh granny's is actually an investment club called the beardstown uh ladies that they were also finding that they were kind of cut out um traditional stock brokers weren't taking them very seriously wasn't really fitting the image of somebody who wanted to invest um in the stock market at the time so they made their own investment club and were meeting up like on a monthly basis to to do this and um they actually got super famous they published some books and um caught the imagination of a lot of people but um actually in the end it turns out their results weren't quite as good um as they proposed but um it still goes on to this day um and again it was feeling like a a very important social functionality it's that kind of meeting up

regularly and having a gossip as well as doing some some investment there as well um so before we look at some of the trends just some of the limitations what has stopped kind of social finance really kind of scaling before now well we can see with like tenders and investment clubs it's still largely kind of a trust-based thing you certainly don't want to enter a tandem with people you don't know it's a quick way to lose money or you don't trust so it's hard to scale it and there's regulatory issues and still for most people they're kind of reliant on c5 so having that that siloed experience and we can see here you know with uh web point one to web.2 you know it changed everything in terms of egg media and consumption

but largely you know pretty much remain the same with our bank and of course we have web.3 so we've got all these new crazy connections this is not a literal diagram it's just to show the the different uh connections that are now possible in this kind of web of opportunities um so now i'm going to pass over to kiel who's going to explore some of the trends that are happening at the moment in d5 they're actually facilitating a more social approach to to finance in something quite exciting yeah so thanks for that rachel um so yeah we see a lot of new opportunities that pop up in d5 and uh digitally um in a more broad sense so in online culture and one of these is the digital identity

because at the moment your life is predominantly especially during lockdown online you're connected more and in the ethereum space this means that your wallet can also be considered not only your financial identity but also your social identity you can deduce a lot from it for instance we saw the rise of nfts that can represent all kinds of decisions you make both financially and socially we for instance have like the proof of attendance protocol so like po-ops of which all of you probably collected a few by now um to really prove you were somewhere and attended an event we also have nfts representing membership and this might give you

exclusive access to certain communities and perks that come with it and as well from like a number of nfts you can deduce in what projects a certain person or certain wallet address has been involved so for instance whether somebody helps to validate the ethereum network whether they participate in governance whether they are a yield farmer or they just like a certain project maybe donate to it and that's not all you can also have a real representation of your investment decisions for instance in uni swap you're issued now an nft representing your position which is also tradable if i'm not mistaking

um and we have all kinds of variants of this it can also show you like donating to a good cause like this food forest nft for example or some more um let's say risky investments in all sorts of dog tokens like woofy is an example from from yearn but i just want to come to the point that we now have this system in place where you can even consider your wallet a sort of universal login method to access all kinds of applications and i think in the history there haven't been much times i think this is the first time you really get to participate in these systems and

communities in a way that you are in control so you can decide whether you want to do it on your own name or you want to rename pseudonymous or anonymous for instance many of you might have an ethereum name service name tag so like a dot eth domain coupled to your wallet address which can be used to link either your real identity to it or your nickname you like to use online and this can have like some real benefits as well why because this really provides a unique digital fingerprint we have some experiments going right now where they are trying to give you a credit score based on your unchain activity for instance arc

x they're developing a d5 passport which might give you better interest rates or better borrowing conditions in a different project we also see other projects using this for growth hacking so you might get early access to some content or receive airdrops for instance like this nft well this traditional artist who prioritizes compound finance and other defy users so you can indeed like really consider your crypto address a form of digital passport that's not all we can even take it one step further like currently many of the firms in

crypto even higher based on your on chain activity so we have on the right side an example of a degen score that keeps track of certain activities you take in the defy space and many companies including delphi digital but also compounds a variety of others use this as an additional metric when hiring so it can be it's a bit strange to say but it's some consider it on par with like a university degree because it really shows you have a hands-on experience in this industry you cannot fake it now we have these digital identities but of course these identities also interact with each

other so we see the rise of a lot of new communities and also tooling related to this here is an overview made by koopa troopa um a while back so it's not even up to date anymore but we have over 100 currently managing over 10 billion dollars worth of assets many coming from uh small contributors who pull their funds for a common cause you have all kinds of different types of them but essentially they're all a way to coordinate people and financial resources and some even like to call it group chats turned into businesses recently we also saw the rise of social tokens which are more focused on the

creator economy in which people rally around a certain artist or creator and also build communities around that now when it comes to managing the funds within these davos or within these decentralized autonomous organizations there are different approaches you could take for instance we could look into more community-led investment approaches of which babylon finance is an example where they use the community and the governance system to vote on where to invest the funds and they share all the proceeds with the people inside the tao as well and this way the investing really

becomes a social endeavor where you have these group decisions that are taken where to lead a project next contrastingly if more the traditional approach where we have one core team that decides on where to allocate funds this allows them to move a lot more quickly but they still take into account some input from the community through governance like an example of that is urine we saw a lot of different types of dao's pop-up also some more really specialized in investing like index co-op which is curating a different list of defy indices or more like traditionally vc

venture type of taos like the lao or flamingo dawa which focuses on investing in nfts now there's one tool i would like to highlight because of course to do this in a trustless and non-custodial manner you have to use some type of tooling an example of that is enzyme which is an unchained asset management protocol which allows you or your community to set up a new investment strategy in a matter of minutes do it all from a multisig or just a regular ethereum account and do it in a transparent and non-custodial manner for instance you have the unslashed uh finance dao which does it to manager protocol treasury you also have f of isis defy

which is pulling um investments from their community through this platform there's a bunch of other projects as well which i won't go into detail but gnosis save is another example that a lot of communities use to manage their funds there is one like little experiment that's going on right now which is called cohort in nape it's developed by the urine team and it's a way to pay out wages within a community or within a company so instead of having a top-down approach where the executives decide your wage here is flipped completely upside down and like every person working together uh with other

persons they can decide how much they want to contribute to their peers so the better work you deliver the more you get paid that's a bit the concept behind it and it's used by multiple projects right now bankless is using as a few other crypto projects to experiment with this peer-to-peer gifting and deciding on new ways to like earn money and that's a concept that we we see more and more with these um interactions that the concept of earning money gets flipped upside down so another big theme i want to bring up is a play to earn model which also depends a lot on social interactions between different players

so we suddenly saw the rise of for instance xc infinity well it's not suddenly it's been a few years in the making but it was just brought into mainstream attention there are over half a million players daily uh using it actively many from emerging countries like the philippines where people are actually earning a living with it so instead of migrating to the west to come work a certain job they just stay at home they form these communities and they play the game to earn a living so they have a scholarship program for instance where you can earn money real money without spending any money just have to dedicate time into playing the game

it's all running on a peer-to-peer in-game economy where the revenue is shared between all the players so this also blurs the lines a bit between what you're doing digitally what you're doing in the real world like what is your job what is just recreation when it comes to play-to-earn games there's also a multiple of experiments like avegachi which uses yield generating nfts and runs on a community owned basis so it's also a dowel in which players can earn quite big sums of money just to complete the game for instance the last rarity farming season had over 2 million dollars worth

distributed to the users so yeah that's uh i'll bring it back to rachel cool so the last thing we're going to talk about is gamification now of course this is a theme just in like finance and like fintech generally but i think gamification works a lot better when you put it in a social setting because we're social animals and it's just a lot more fun um so we can see a great example of this is like pull together which is like the no loss a lottery which really allows you to get quite substantial uh sums by not actually you know even buying a lottery ticket and they themselves have moved over to a dow so they're kind of going to this uh socially coordinated there's combined tickets with pods all these kind of things so super exciting

and then warning small shield from our project uh so um we are in the space of uh gamified uh social savings uh so good ghosting is a social saving pool um basically works like this so um the pool will run for a fixed amount of time you make regular deposits into it we move it somewhere where it's going to generate some extra income so at the moment we're on ave on polygon and then at the end we split like the interest amongst everyone who hit those uh regular savings um it's also sponsored we actually did launch a pool yesterday to coincide with ecc so if you're curious to try it around you can uh go to goodghosting.com and you can check that out um yeah we've incentivized it so you'll get a minimum of five die if you complete it but probably more

depe depending on the interest and how many people stay in the game if you're the last person standing you'll get a lot um but we're like encouraging users to kind of build social build build better financial habits and doing in a social setting so this is our ui we found out when we did user testing that people are super interested in how other people in the pool are doing they really want to know that they're doing well but they also want to know they're doing better than other people and i think this speaks to something quite deep in the human psyche um but um yeah we're going to add more gamification explore this this area as well um so that's that yeah this is a diagram a community member made for us of how the kind of pool works at a high level um yeah and then uh just in conclusion

um so basically like looking at all of these themes with you know your address becoming your like online profile something you can use to get a job something you can use to get um you know airdrop something that's quite dear to you and you can be quite proud of uh like tokenized online communities dow's a huge explosion we've seen in that uh all of this happening in a composable way like we build on top of ave we don't need to ask permission to do that anyone can do these things so there's so many you know possibilities open to us um and then like bringing elements of gamification into something into finance which kind of has been traditionally like by ourselves a little bit lonely and kind of a little bit stale really so we're kind of now in this moment where we're all

kind of playing this massive kind of online game of d5 with all these different areas in it um super exciting it's obviously going to evolve in many ways that we can't see now and i think that is what is exciting about this industry um yeah and then just to kind of uh round off just got a couple of quotes which i think kind of can sum up some of the nice uh nice sentiment that's available so like axiom affinity infinity is the web 2 mindset is you know if it's successful the founders make it with uh web3 if it's successful everyone makes it so it's a really nice opportunity um and then metacartel if you want to go fast go go alone but if you want to go far

go together so yeah we can go together on this journey of social finance and and see what we find um yeah that's it um feel free to kind of reach out to either myself or heal on on telego on telegram or follow us on twitter we've also got a discord if you want to find out more about good ghosting and what we're doing there as well um maybe just uh quickly the game is limited to 300 people so if you want to join it's best to not wait too long we're going 120 people in it at the moment so yeah jump in and have a mess around with that you can get a fun future of france nft as well um but yeah like that's that's pretty much it like i

don't know i think we've got like a minute or two for questions if anyone has any questions finally meet you nice to meet you nice to meet you yeah so actually i have a question what happens if everyone is a good ghost if everyone is a good ghost well um then it would mean you would i mean you would get the interest would be split amongst everyone okay um but it's still a success because everyone's hit their goals but with the pools we have at the moment they we've actually received some grants and some fundings to incentivize it so even if everyone hit even if everyone

saved with good ghosting you would still get more than if you saved by yourself because we have some incentivization um we did run a test and we had about 200 people doing our closed beta testing and of those 200 it was just over 200 around 150 completed so that's kind of the rate that we've seen it would be interesting to see like how that holds up if that's standard or if you know there are games where everyone hits it but and as soon as somebody drops out you earn more than you would deposit in ave by yourself for instance so you can if you're a bit motivated you will come out on top normally but we like to make something that like um you know that if you do that you can get something out of it so it's not a it's not a it's

not a case of luck it's just you have to put in the behavior to save regularly so yeah thank you cool have no questions thank you and yeah thank you for having us thanks a lot oh nice